Tech News

Wednesday, 26 October 2011

Et Tu, Euro

So here we are the Endgame, The final chapter, The Collapse, The Saving, the grand bargain. All terms that imply a "that's all folks" caption at the end of the show.

Tomorrow you will be able to pick up your newspaper and read about something else, It will all be over. History uncomfortably for the 24 hour news cycle is not like that

But don't tell the intrepid journalists camped outside the EU commission buildings watching the movers and shakers arrive like actors on Oscar night. Maybe we ought to supply sponsorship boards for them to be interviewed in front? a few words to comfort their public before the big event.

Things like currencies and political alliances fizzle out rather than burn out quickly, but even by historical standards a dozen years is disastrously poor. So where is or was the "beginning of the end" if that what is unfolding?

Everyone seems to be pointing at 2008, when the enlightened Europeans scoffed at sub prime and the Anglo-Saxon model and did not bother to recapitalise their banks, Lending large dollops of cash to safe politicians who share their jokes at long summit dinners was so much more responsible than lending cash to the poor plebs trying to buy a house. They could not comprehend that is happening to them was another chapter in pretty much the same book.

I think the pivotal year was 2005 and in particular the French rejection of the Euro Elites constitution and its subsequent ramming through against the wishes of the rest of the people of the EU. Signals are very important in politics, democracy will always trump politics in general, without it the politicos are without legitimacy, The signal was democracy does not matter, we have the truth and thus the legitimacy to over ride democracy. Even for most Europeans who support the EU, that must have been a shock.

The mind set of people who promote some sort of paradigm or model, tends to be one of scientism. Economics and politics move from the debating chamber to the classroom, and the experts dispense their wisdom, democracy becomes much less important. Thus the Euro is not an economic tool in a utilitarian sense it becomes an end in its self, the universal truth.

If they had not been so bull headed and full of hubris and took the people with them in a meaningful sense, the last 15 month would have been difficult but not the cascade of events that have dogged them from day to day. They would have had the missing ingredient that markets and money functions by "trust", trust cannot be quantified on a A4 piece of paper, you either have it or you don't. What they wanted was a federal Europe but were afraid to ask the people that mattered if they wanted it too, it was and is the great lie.

So now they find themselves having to reveal the great lie for a federal Europe and having to construct a single treasury and the implications that come with that, its always about the money. And they will once again no doubt bypass the will of the people of Europe, they dare not do otherwise. And the stark truth will be for all to see, and it will be hated, without the popular support such a course of action would need for legitimacy. Trust the very thing that is beyond science will not be constructed along with the treasury.

So they are damned it they do and damned if they dont, and damned they will be.